IBM Touts New Storage Systems

1 January 1970

But its attempt to take shots at a competitor fly back in its face as EMC dismisses announcement as part of a battle for second place in the sector

NEW YORK - IBM says its new Fibre Channel disk-based storage systems can bridge enterprise and midrange environments by bringing high end functions to smaller storage servers and ease of use to its high-end products.

"This is going to change not just the functions that are available to people in all spectrums of storage but the price- performance economics around these things," Bill Zeitler, senior vice-president of IBM's systems and technology group, told a press conference here last month.

The enterprise TotalStorage DS8000 series will have up to six times the performance of the ESS800 it replaces, he said, and has an architecture that can manage up to 96 petabytes of storage. It runs on two p5 processors taken from IBM's Power processor line; eventually IBM said, there will be models running 16 CPUs.

However, most Canadian IBM resellers will be more interested in the petite midrange DS6000 series, which IBM said will offer almost twice the scalability of EMC's DMX800 starting at half the price - just under US$100,000.

The modular DS6000 is run by IBM's PowerPC processors and can scale from 580 GB to 67.2 terabytes. It can connect to systems running Windows, Unix, Linux, as well as IBM's zOS and OS/400 operating systems.

Share management software

It can also be hooked to DS8000 systems, and IBM said the fact that they share management software will help companies save money.

To emphasize the size difference between the two units, the company displayed what it said was a similar EMC storage system with 12 disks that was about 6.5 feet high. The 16-disk DS6000 is about 5.25 inches (3U) high.

Or, as one IBM official put it, the DS6000 is four per cent of the size of the equivalent EMC DMX800 storage server at one-tenth of the weight.

But in a statement EMC Corp. shrugged off the announcements, calling them part of "a battle with Hitachi for second place" in the worldwide market for external storage devices. Storage customers increasingly are interested in the types of data-management software that EMC is focused on, rather than raw performance, the company said.

"IBM has a real credibility gap with customers due to more than a decade of unfulfilled product promises (SeaScape, IceCube, StorageTank, Piper) and general weakness across its existing portfolio including scale/performance issues," the statement said.

However Tony Asaro, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group of Milford, Mass., an industry research company, called the new IBM systems "a major break-through."

The DS6000 offers customers a low-cost storage server with enterprise-class functions and a small footprint, he said. And, he added, "space is gold in certain data centres."

Anthony Bongiovanni, president of Micro Strategies Inc., a New Jersey IBM systems integrator invited to the event, said he was "very impressed," with the new products.

"It bridges the gap we've had for a while between [IBM's] FastT product line and the Shark [ESS] product line," he said.

"I'm very excited about this. They are many steps beyond what the competition has."

Four year warranties

The DS6000 will be available to IBM Business Partners in December. However, no Canadian pricing or marketing plans were available. The DS8000 will only be sold through partners. Both come with four-year hardware and software warranties.

Right now the DS6000 only comes with FibreChannel hard drives. Versions using Serial ATA will come out in the future, the company said.

It also includes redundant FibreChannel switches, RAID controllers and power supplies, as well as what IBM said is enterprise-class data backup and recovery capabilities.

Among other features touted by IBM, it said high-end versions of the DS8000 will be able to run IBM's virtualization engine technology to run multiple logical partitions.

In an interview before the announcement, IDC Canada analyst Alan Freedman noted there's a fierce race among leading mid-range storage vendors, who in Canada include IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and EMC. "All vendors are facing the declining price challenge - dollars per gigabyte is dropping very rapidly, so it's a challenge to maintain profitable operations," he said.

* DS8000 offers storage system logical partitions

* DS6000 has modular form factor

* Both have 4-year warranties

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Nov 5, 2004